A New Myth for the Uncontainable Ones

There is an old story, told in a thousand voices, across a thousand epochs.

It is the story of love as a singular path, a singular devotion, a singular undoing. It is the story of the one great love that devours all others, that demands everything in return. In these stories, love is a knife: You cut away what demarcated before from now, you carve out a space in your chest, and you offer yourself to the flame.

We have been told that if love is real, it must be all-consuming.

That to step into a love that shakes the very foundation of our being, we must leave behind all that we were prior to its arrival.

That love is a portal through which only one version of ourselves may pass.

But there is another story, one that has been whispering through the cracks of time, waiting for the ones bold enough to remember it.

It is a story that does not end in exile.

It is a story that does not demand erasure.

It is the story of love as an ever-growing landscape—wild, untamable, fecund with new life forms. Limitless.

The Old Myth: Love as Trial, as Fire, as Severance

The old myths demand proof. Proof of devotion, proof of sacrifice, proof that love is more than a passing wind. And how do you prove love?

You cut off the past. You forsake what was. You stand in the ashes of your old life and call it transformation.

We have seen this story before.

• The mystic who renounces all they have built—their art, their home, their community—to chase a transcendent love they trust will initiate them into a higher state of being…only to find they were always meant to birth their love into the world, not escape from it.
• The wanderer who belongs everywhere and nowhere, slipping between identities, cultures, and selves, but never quite finding the place where they can rest—until they are forced to ask if home was ever meant to be a place at all.
• The poet who erases every past version of themselves for the sake of passion, believing that in order to be chosen, they must first be rendered unrecognizable to themselves.
• The warrior who believes love must be proven through sacrifice, surrendering their softness, their tenderness—offering only their strength, never realizing they were meant to be adored in all their forms.
• The oracle who sees their future written in the eyes of another but assumes fate demands that they leave behind their history, their sacred ground…as if devotion cannot unfurl from familiar soil.
• The lovers who believe they must flee to prove their passion, that love is only real if it is forged in exile, never questioning whether they might have been meant to build a new world right where they stood…not from the ashes of their old lives, but from the raw, undiluted truth of who they have always been—and from the courage to be fully seen and known.

And we, the children of these stories, have inherited the belief that to step into something new, we must destroy what came before.

That love is a house that cannot hold more than one story at a time.
That love is a blade, rather than a bridge.
That love is a cage, rather than a sky.

But what if the old myths were wrong?
Or rather—what if they were only half the truth?

A New Myth: Love as Expansion, Not Wound

There is another way.

A way where love is not a door that locks behind you, but a horizon that stretches forward.
A way where new love does not demand the sacrifice of the old, but builds upon it.
A way where the heart does not shrink to accommodate a single devotion, but grows to make space for glorious uncontainability.

To love in this way is to refuse the decree for destruction. It is to say:

• I will not exile myself from what I have built, just because something new calls me forward.
• I will not turn love into a trade—this for that, past for future, one desire for another.
• I will not believe the lie that devotion requires scarcity, that love is real only when it is singular.

This is not an easy story to tell.
Because the world trafficks in binaries.

Because the world trusts a stable hearth more than it trusts a blazing growth.

Because the world does not know how to hold a love that does not writhe beneath an ultimatum, bow beneath a summons, or bleed beneath a reckoning.

But what if our collective imagination is asking us to stretch into a new truth?

• A love that asks you to shrink is not love at all. It is fear disguised as kindness.
• A love that demands exile instead of expansion is not love—it is a mistrust of vastness disguised as devotion.
• A love that forces you to choose between the vows that shaped you and the portal that calls you forward is not love—it is control disguised as fate. True love does not sever; it expands, making room for both the roots and the horizon, for what has been sworn and what has yet to unfold.

The Fear That Holds Us Captive

Why do we fear the new myth that love is asking us to breathe into being?

Because we have been told that to hold more than one love, more than one devotion, more than one truth, is selfish.

Because we have been told that if love does not come with sacrifice, it is not real.
Because we secretly believe that if we allow ourselves to expand, we will become too vast for the world to hold.

But is this fear the voice of love?

Or is it the whisper of scarcity dressed in devotion, the tightening hand that mistakes its grip for grace?

We have learned love from a world that detests its own vastness, that measures the heart in rations, that warns: Take in too much, and you will drown; you will fracture; you will be lost.

But love is not an economy.

It is not a barter of longing for permission, not a careful tally of what is owed and what is spared.

Love is the cosmos spilling over itself, a star collapsing and birthing a thousand more.

Love is the river that carves new paths in the dark, never asking if it is allowed.

Love is the great horizon that does not demand you sever the road behind you, but dares you to walk forward— with everything, with all of it, with all of you.

What It Means to Love Without Erasure

To love without erasure is to live in the impossible vastness of the in-between.

• It is to cherish what you have built, without fearing what is still unfolding.
• It is to step into the arms of something new, without burning down the home that sheltered you.
• It is to say yes to fire, without worrying that it will consume you whole.

This is not a love that the old myths understand.
This is not a love that the world knows how to hold.

But it is a love that exists, waiting for those who are bold enough to step beyond the edge of the known map.

Not a love that binds.

Not a love that cuts.

But a love that expands, enriches, and engenders even more possibilities that currently only exist beyond the threshold of the known.

The Strength to Expand

To love in this way is not easy. It requires a strength beyond certainty.

Because it means holding paradox without trying to resolve it.
Because it means trusting love’s infinitude, even when the world tells you it must be contained.
Because it means rambling into the unknown, not with a torch to burn the past, but with open hands to carry what is still sacred.

And perhaps that is what this moment in time is calling us toward.

Not a love that demands exile.
Not a love that trades one life for another.
Not a love that forces us to choose.

But a love that is big enough to hold everything.

A love that refuses the old maps and fashions a new myth by threading together all the directions instead.

A love that does not end in destruction, but in widening—until the heart itself becomes a universe, large enough to hold both the roots and the sky.

A love that is not a cage. But a new world, waiting to be made through us.

There are those who come into the world to bring light, to open doors, to remind others of what they have forgotten. And there are those who, upon seeing this light, try to fix it in place—to name it, to worship it, to build walls around it and call it a temple.

But the ones who truly carry the fire are not meant to be tethered.

This is the paradox of the liminal ones, the wanderers, the threshold dwellers, the ones who belong equally to the seen and the unseen. They are called forward to awaken something, to stir embers, to remind people of what already lives inside them. But they are not meant to become the altar where others kneel, mistaking devotion for their own awakening.

And yet—the world loves to build shrines and pedestals. It loves to take a luminous thread and pin it to the sky like a fixed celestial object, demanding that it remain in the place where others found it, never shifting, never slipping beyond reach.

When the Role Becomes the Cage

For those who have spent their lives learning to listen at the threshold of mystery, who have devoted themselves to honing their ability to step into the unseen, there comes a moment of reckoning: What happens when people stop seeing you as a traveler and start seeing you as a destination?

The role of the spiritual teacher, the guide, the one who sees—it can become a binding, a constriction, a slow erosion of freedom.

Because what was meant to be fluid, what was meant to move, what was meant to come and go like the changing tides, is now expected to remain. To mire itself in consistency, to be legible, to be available for consumption.

To be placed on a pedestal is to be made into an object.

 To be named a teacher is to be trapped inside the name.

To be revered is to be confined.

And the moment a person stops being perceived as a participant in the great unfolding and is instead turned into a keeper of truth, something is lost. Because truth is not meant to be kept—it is meant to be discovered, rediscovered, lived, breathed, danced with, unraveled, found again.

The Hunger to Possess, the Fear of the Wild

Why does the world do this? Why does it struggle to let the liminal ones remain in their movement, their paradox, their wildness?

Because to the world, fluidity is terrifying—it unmoors the fixed, blurs the edges, queers the certainty that power depends upon. It refuses the singular, the binary, the ordained and orthodox path. It is the lover who will not be named, the current that will not be dammed, the presence that slips between definitions and asks: What if there was never one way, one truth, one shape to hold us all?
Because a teacher who does not stay in one place cannot be controlled.

Because a fire that moves cannot be claimed.

And yet, the world is hungry for certainty. It is hungry for figures who will remain stable, who will give clear answers, who will stand still long enough to be followed. 

But those who dwell in the liminal do not offer certainty. They offer fire. And fire is not meant to be contained.

There is a danger in believing that wisdom belongs only to those who hold the role of teacher, sage, mystic, prophet. There is a danger in believing that those who bear the torch of remembering are meant to carry it for others indefinitely. The role of the teacher can be a beautiful offering, but when it becomes a demand, it ceases to be free.

The Freedom to Come and Go

There is another way. A way in which one can step into the role but not be trapped inside it. A way in which one can bring wisdom without being fossilized into a relic. A way in which one can light the fire and then walk away, knowing that the fire will remain.

The truest teachers are the ones who do not demand devotion. The ones who do not ask to be followed. The ones who do not mistake their own insights for immutable truth. The ones who say: “I will give you everything I have. And then I will leave. And you will still have it.”

These are the ones who move between, who belong to the road as much as to any place of return. They do not stay to be worshipped. They move so that others might follow—not after them, but after their own remembering.

Because the world does not need more idols cast in stone, more gatekeepers of brittle certainty, more voices claiming to be the final answer, demanding worship instead of wonder.

What the world needs are the ones who refuse to be tethered. The ones who come, awaken, burn bright—and then disappear into the horizon, leaving the embers behind to catch and spread.

The ones who remind us that we were never meant to worship the fire.

We were meant to become it.

For centuries, the oracle has been imagined as a passive conduit—a woman in a trance, a seer overcome by visions, a mouthpiece through which a vast and ineffable divine (usually prefigured as masculine) speaks. The oracle is often revered but removed, a figure who surrenders to the will of forces beyond her control. She does not shape the prophecy; she merely delivers it.

But this is an incomplete story. And it is one that no longer holds.

Because to channel is not to be erased. 

To be a medium is not to dissolve into something else.

To be an oracle is not to be filled like an empty vessel.

The truth is far stranger. Far wilder.

Not a Receiver, but a Frequency

There is a persistent canard that oracles are simply receivers—that they pick up transmissions like a radio tuned to the right station. That the message exists somewhere else, fully formed, waiting for a worthy body to deliver it.

But the ones who know—the real seers, the real translators of the unseen— will tell you this is not how it works.

Because the oracle is not just a receiver. The oracle is the frequency itself.

What moves through you is not separate from you. It is not a foreign voice whispering into your ear, dictating truths that do not belong to you. It is your own resonance, your own being, vibrating in a way that allows the liminal to take form.

You are not just a listener. You are a summoner.  You are a translator of what you have already known, in the part of you that remembers before memory.

The world tells you that the unseen must come from elsewhere—from a god, from a spirit, from an external source.

But the world is wrong.

Because what comes is not bestowed. It is evoked. It is embodied.

You are not an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

You are a river with its own current.

You are the flood that carves its own path, and the tide that answers only to the cosmic body that governs it.

To Channel Is to Speak in Your Own Tongue

It’s another lie that to channel is to become neutral. That to speak prophecy means to step aside, to let something other take over, to become a pure, untouched conduit through which the message flows unimpeded.

But the truth is that nothing comes through you without passing through your own tongue, your own imagery, your own rhythm.

This is why oracles do not all speak in the same voice.

This is why the language of the unseen is shaped by the one who speaks it.

The words that come to you carry the cadence of your own being.

The images that arise draw from the wellspring of your own knowing.

The prophecy is woven from your own resonance.

You do not vanish in the act of receiving. You transmute what comes. You shape it. You give it form in a way that only you can.

To be an oracle is not to disappear. It is to become more fully yourself, to recognize that what is moving through you is not separate from you. It is to stop questioning whether it is real and start asking: What will I do with what I have been given?

The Oracle of This Time Must Refuse the Pedestal

There is another reason people misunderstand the oracle: They want her to be a fixed point in a firmament that is constantly in flux.

The world fears the ones who do not stay in place. The ones who move between, who come and go, who refuse pinned to a singular role. The world wants the oracle to be static, enshrined, trapped in the shape of a teacher, a guide, an authority.

But the oracle does not belong on a pedestal.  The pedestal is a cage, not an honor.  The moment you are enshrined, you are contained. 

This is why the true oracle of today must refuse the static role. She must be fluid. She must be unfixed. She must be the fire that moves, not the idol that is worshipped. She must refuse to be the thing that others hold onto in place of their own remembering.

Because the oracle’s purpose is not to be followed—it is to awaken. Not to be worshipped—but to ignite something in others that cannot be extinguished.

The oracle of this time does not seek disciples. She does not seek to be a figurehead, a guru, a singular authority. She is here to scatter the fire like glowing seeds. To whisper to others, “You, too, can speak with the unseen.”  

To remind the world, "You were never meant to be led. You were meant to remember."

What It Means to Be a Medium Now

So, what does it mean to be a medium, a channel, an oracle in this era?

It means you are not a mouthpiece.
It means you are not a servant of something outside yourself.
It means you do not exist to be understood, validated, or made legible.

It means you stand at the crossroads and translate the wind. 

It means you let the river of the unseen move through you—not as something foreign, but as something that has always belonged to you.

It means you trust what comes, knowing it is not separate from you, knowing that what rises in you is the shape of your own frequency speaking back.

And above all—it means you refuse to be tethered.

For the oracle who stands still becomes a monument, not a mouthpiece.

The channel that seeks permanence forgets it was always meant to be a threshold.

To be an oracle today is not to carry answers in cupped hands, but to dance in the open palms of the questions—to let the mystery move through you,
unbound, unnamed, unafraid.

It is to let the mystery breathe through you and give it form—not as doctrine, not as certainty, but as a pulsing luminosity in the darkness, as queerness, as fluidity, as the wild beast that refuses to be caged.It is to whisper to those who are waiting: “You were always meant to hear this.
You were always meant to remember.”

This is a talk I recently gave to one of the alumni groups for the incredible Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program, which I completed in 2023. The topic of loneliness is one I ponder fairly frequently, being prone to spells of it that I can only describe as mental vertigo. But, as the talk demonstrates, there is a special quality within loneliness that we can learn to alchemize, and that can offer us unexpected paths to the connection we all want and deserve.

Clear light. Pure light. Rainbow light. The light that surpasses cognition. The light that disavows duality. The light that is not separate from darkness. How do we walk toward it? How do we recognize it? How does it change the way we see-hear-feel-think-sense-know?

Contemplate your typical associations with light. Are they of the “spiritual” garden variety? Do you use or routinely hear terms such as “love and light”? Do you see yourself as being of the light, or does that feel too abstract or out of context to you? Think about the necessity of light. Think about your own periods of “seeing the light.” Do you retreat from cosmic light, as described in the meditation? Or do you move toward it and recognize your identity within it? Let all of your thoughts coalesce before you move on to the writing exercise.

Writing Prompt: Respond to the following questions:

How does cosmic light express itself in me?

What is the source of my own light?

How does it manifest?

What does it feel like?

Alternatively, write your story of cosmic light. Imagine the moment you came into existence as you. Imagine that the cosmic light itself had a message for you. What was it?

Please enjoy this 9-minute meditation on self-love, inspired by Tara Well’s superb book, Mirror Meditation: The Power of Neuroscience and Self-Reflection to Overcome Criticism, Gain Confidence, and See Yourself with Compassion. Musical accompaniment, as always, is provided by my beloved, Shawn Feeney (shawnfeeney.com, https://www.instagram.com/shawnfeeney).

Please enjoy this month’s meditation on deeply listening and reattuning to ourselves. It includes sonic accompaniment from my husband, Shawn Feeney (website: shawnfeeney.com; Instagram: @shawnfeeney). I’m thrilled to share that we’ll be collaborating together on a series of monthly meditative livestreams, retreats, and other events—more to come in future newsletters.